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    Mauch

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    Sidney Carter
    The document discusses two early USAF spacesuit development efforts from 1959-1964. The first was a mechanical counterpressure suit developed by Mauch Laboratories that used expanding foam layers. The second was a pressure suit and life support system developed by David Clark Company for the USAF's Extravehicular Protective Assembly program to support lunar and Earth-orbital activities.

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    Mauch

    Uploaded by

    Sidney Carter
    88 views2 pages
    The document discusses two early USAF spacesuit development efforts from 1959-1964. The first was a mechanical counterpressure suit developed by Mauch Laboratories that used expanding foam layers. The second was a pressure suit and life support system developed by David Clark Company for the USAF's Extravehicular Protective Assembly program to support lunar and Earth-orbital activities.

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    Mauch

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    The document discusses two early USAF spacesuit development efforts from 1959-1964. The first was a mechanical counterpressure suit developed by Mauch Laboratories that used expanding foam layers. The second was a pressure suit and life support system developed by David Clark Company for the USAF's Extravehicular Protective Assembly program to support lunar and Earth-orbital activities.

    Copyright:

    Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as pdf or txt
    88 views2 pages

    Mauch

    Uploaded by

    Sidney Carter
    The document discusses two early USAF spacesuit development efforts from 1959-1964. The first was a mechanical counterpressure suit developed by Mauch Laboratories that used expanding foam layers. The second was a pressure suit and life support system developed by David Clark Company for the USAF's Extravehicular Protective Assembly program to support lunar and Earth-orbital activities.

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    Sec. 8.

    2]

    8.2 Early USAF spacesuit developments (195964) 175

    Figure 8.1.2. DCC X-20 ``Dyna-Soar'' suit congurations.


    (Courtesy, left and right, Hamilton Sundstrand and G.L. Harris)

    8.2

    EARLY USAF SPACESUIT DEVELOPMENTS (195964)

    The USAF's foray into spacesuits was not limited to specic program applications. The USAF funded two interesting eorts in its rst years in the eld. One was a unique approach to a mechanical counterpressure suit that was concepted and executed by Mauch Laboratories of Ohio. The other was the David Clark Company's implementation of USAF concepts for an extravehicular suit system. In 1959, the USAF funded Mauch to explore the idea of using a passive approach to mechanical counterpressure rather than the ``active'' method used in the David Clark capstan-tube ``partial pressure'' that was used in defense applications and the X-1 record attempts. Like the David Clark system, the head and lungs were provided with pressurized oxygen while a garment tightened on the torso, arms and legs to provide a closely matching external counterpressure. This Mauch suit (Figure 8.2.1) utilized the dynamics of closed cell foam, which expands as the material decompresses. To benet from this, the suit featured a tighttting garment with a layer of closed cell foam sandwiched between two layers of fabric. The inner layer held the foam in place, while the outer layer provided the boundary against which the expanding foam reacted to provide pressure on the wearer's body. The goal of this research was to produce a suit system that would be highly mobile and permit evaporative cooling to eectively occur at the skin level, thus

    176

    US Air Force spacesuits

    [Ch. 8

    Figure 8.2.1. Mauch mechanical counterpressure suit.

    avoiding body heat containment/capture typical of full pressure suits. This program, which was concluded by 1962, was successful to the extent that the suit demonstrated the ability to keep a subject alive in a vacuum chamber for hours. However, it was not the mobility and life support solution for which the USAF had hoped. In yet another activity, the USAF explored the development of a complete spacesuit system for performing activities outside of the spacecraft. In July 1962, the USAF contracted the David Clark Company for the development, system level integration and delivery of a pressure suit and life support system for the USAF Aerospace Medical Research Laboratory's Extravehicular Protective Assembly (Figure 8.2.2) program which operated from the WrightPatterson Air Force Base between 1962 and 1964. The primary goal was to develop an extravehicular activity (EVA) spacesuit that would support both lunar and Earth-orbital activities. The goal of the David Clark pressure suit assembly was to provide EVA protection in a subsystem that weighed no more than 25 lb (11 kg) and could be donned without assistance in ve minutes or less. The helmet was cylindrically shaped and fabricated in stainless steel to WrightAerospace Development Division concepts and specications. It featured a two-piece EVA sunvisor that retracted upward to be stored in the forehead area and slid down with a slight overlap between the two, to cover the eld of vision. The torso pressure garment was a Gemini-like rear entry suit utilizing Link-net technology for mobility. The EVA cover garment included

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